The invention relates generally to devices for catching food and other debris which a child in a seat attached to a table may drop or throw, and more particularly to a device for use with a child's seat of the type that attaches to a table top.
Infants and young children appear to be born with an instinct for throwing or spilling or dropping food. utensils, dishes and anything else within reach while being fed. After feeding the child, the parent is faced with the problem of not only cleaning up the child but cleaning up the floor area surrounding the child as well. One approach to minimizing the after-feeding clean-up has been to spread an apron-like device around a child's high chair, such as disclosed by Caponera in U.S. Pat. No. 2,585,434, or by Brown in U.S. Pat. No. 2,938,574. Other proposed solutions have been to surround a child seated in a high chair with a canopy located at roughly the level of the chest, as disclosed by the patents to Thomas, U.S. Pat. Nos. 1,309,343 and 1,377,860.
Such prior art solutions have been adapted to the more modern use of a portable clip-on baby seat as disclosed in the patent to MacLennan, U.S. Pat. No. 4,659,143. MacLennan attaches a food catcher to a table top on both sides of a child's seat, the food catcher generally surrounding and extending beneath the seated child. MacLennan's device is somewhat cumbersome, however, and suffers from the drawback that the food catch is not immediately replaceable. What is needed is a portable and compact food catch for use with a child's clip-on seat, that permits quick and easy replacement of the catch.